East of Eden on Netflix: How the Streamer Adapted Steinbeck's 1952 Novel

Netflix released all seven episodes of its "East of Eden" miniseries on October 1, 2026. Within four days it topped the platform's global English-language TV chart with 6.5 million views, equal to about 45.5 million hours watched, according to Netflix's own weekly Top 10 report and tracking by Whats-on-Netflix. The show reached the No. 1 spot in more than 20 countries, including the UK, France, Germany, Canada and Brazil, while ranking closer to No. 6 in India, the Philippines and Thailand.

Who made it, and who is in it

The series was created and written by actor-director Zoe Kazan, the granddaughter of Elia Kazan, who directed the 1955 film version of the same novel starring James Dean. She co-showran the Netflix project with Jeb Stuart. Garth Davis directed the first four episodes and Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre the final three, with a score by Laura Karpman, according to Wikipedia's entry on the series.

Florence Pugh plays Cathy Ames, Christopher Abbott plays Adam Trask and Mike Faist plays his brother Charles. Hoon Lee plays Lee, the Trask family's servant, and Ciarán Hinds plays neighbor Samuel Hamilton. Joseph Zada and Joe Anders play Adam's twin sons, Caleb and Aron. Filming took place in New Zealand — in Auckland, Dunedin and Oamaru — from October 2024 to March 2025, and Netflix added an eighth hour of material after seeing early footage of Faist's performance, per the same Wikipedia summary.

What the adaptation changed from Steinbeck's novel

John Steinbeck's 1952 novel follows two families, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, across generations in California's Salinas Valley. Netflix's adaptation narrows its focus mainly to the Trask brothers, Adam and Charles, and to Cathy; Samuel Hamilton appears in the cast primarily as the Trasks' neighbor rather than as the head of his own family's parallel storyline, according to Wikipedia's cast description.

The most-debated change concerns Cathy. In the novel, Steinbeck writes her as someone who acts from pure self-interest, with little explanation offered for her cruelty. Critic Rebecca Onion, writing in Slate, reported that the series instead gives Cathy an invented traumatic childhood and lets her narrate her own backstory — material that does not appear in the book. Onion argued this softens a character the novel treats as an amoral force, and that the change affects how the story's other arcs, particularly Adam's, read on screen. Kazan told interviewers, according to the same Slate piece, that she wanted to make Cathy more "relatable to an audience."

Slate's review also noted an expanded role for Lee, whose loneliness in the novel is reframed on screen around racist exclusion, and the invention of Charles appearing as a ghost figure in later episodes.

How critics reviewed it

Review aggregator scores vary slightly by source: Rotten Tomatoes lists the series at 87% from critics and 82% from audiences, while Wikipedia's page cites an 86% critics' score and a Metacritic rating of 80 out of 100. Rotten Tomatoes' critics' consensus, as cited on Wikipedia's page, points to Pugh and Hoon Lee's expanded performances as central to the adaptation's strengths.

Effect on the book

The series also drove new interest in Steinbeck's original text. Penguin Classics reported close to a 200 percent increase in sales of the novel after Netflix greenlit the adaptation, and the book reached No. 1 on Amazon's bestseller list after the show's release, per Whats-on-Netflix's tracking of publisher and retailer data.